The present invention relates to the field of information technology, and more particularly, to a processing method for a device having a bi-stable display and an apparatus.
Recently, bi-stable display technology such as E-ink and E-paper has been employed increasingly. In general, bi-stable display technology is a proprietary material mainly composed of microcapsules and formed in a film so as to be integrated with an electronic display. A current bi-stable display usually supports two colors, namely black and white. Each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electronic field is applied on the top of the microcapsule, the positive white particles move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible to the user. At the same time, a positive electronic field is applied at the bottom of the microcapsule such that the black particles move to the bottom of the microcapsule to become invisible. In this way, the screen spots corresponding to this microcapsule appear white. On the contrary, the corresponding screen spots will be black by reversing the electronic field.
Unlike a conventional display which uses backlight to illuminate its pixels, according to the bi-stable display technology, the electronic field is no longer applied when the display is in a stable state and therefore no power is consumed. In other words, the microcapsule in a bi-stable display only consumes power when the display state is updated (from black to white, or from white to black). Therefore, one of the prominent advantages of a bi-stable display lies in maintaining the displayed content continuously without consuming power if the displayed content does not change. In addition, bi-stable display technology such as E-ink mimics the appearance of ink tracks and read effect on ordinary paper, reflects light like ordinary paper, which has less irritation to eyes, and may read directly even in direct sunlight. Due to these advantages, its application on, for example, a mobile device has attracted much attention from both consumers and manufacturers. For example, many E-ink-based portable read devices have been unveiled in the market (e.g., Amazon Kindle, among others).
Considering that a mobile portable device is generally powered by a battery with limited duration, further reducing the power consumption of a bi-stable display is a valuable concern. For a portable device having a bi-stable display, most of the power is consumed by the display screen. As above mentioned, a bi-stable display only consumes power when the screen is updated. Therefore, prior art solutions of power saving for bi-stable displays share a common idea of comparing the overlapped portion between contents on two pages when displaying page shift, and the electronic field is not applied to the microcapsules corresponding to the screen spots with no need to be updated. However, prior art solutions are completely passive in that the power saving is entirely dependent on the overlap degree between contents of two successive pages. When two successive pages are significantly different from one another, the effect of power saving will be poor.